


Exodus Laughing (She's His Cocaine)

by sinaddict



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-22
Updated: 2004-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-08 08:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinaddict/pseuds/sinaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duncan has not been himself since Lilly was gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exodus Laughing (She's His Cocaine)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through "Like A Virgin."

**01 // bring your sister if you can't handle it**

"Come on, Duncan, _please_," Lilly draws out the word 'please' into at least five syllables as she bounces excitedly in the passenger seat, and she's grinning because Duncan's laughing and they both know he's going to let her have her way. "You know you wanna go!"

"You know, you are sixteen," Duncan reminds her, shaking his head as he makes the turnoff smoothly. "You're getting a little old for Chuck E. Cheese."

"You're never too old for Chuck E. Cheese," Lilly rolls her eyes and flips down the mirror in the visor, pressing her lips together and blowing a kiss at herself. "Besides, it's more fun now since you win all the games and get me those cute stuffed animals."

"I've been winning all the games and getting you stuffed animals since I was five."

"And that's why I love you," Lilly beams at him as they pull into the rather deserted parking lot and Duncan just shakes his head again because he knows he's being conned, but he lets her get away with it anyway. The restaurant looks darker than he remembers, and he checks his watch to make sure that they were still open.

He blinks and she's already halfway across the parking lot, obviously eager to get started on the game playing, so he hurries after her and orders her favorite pizza while she runs off to get Chuck E. Cheese coins for the games. She straps herself into a ride that goes around in circles with three kids less than half her age and imperiously instructs Duncan, "Go win me something cute at the free toss, Donut."

Chuckling, Duncan complies and while they're waiting for their number to be called, he wins her enough tickets to get a giant stuffed panda that he has a feeling will be named Duncan (along with six thousand other stuffed animals he's won her over the years) and it will reside in his bedroom since she's long since run out of space in her own room for her stuffed animals.

Veronica cracked up when she found Pinky the Unicorn amongst his soccer trophies.

"Okay, big brother, you gonna tell me why we're here?" Lilly asks after her second slice of pizza as she sprinkles red peppers over a third slice, and Duncan frowns as he realizes that his half of the pizza doesn't have any cheese on it.

"They must really be hoping people will pay the $1.29 for extra cheese," he shakes his head. "And we're here because Your Highness demanded it."

"Here, use this," Lilly hands him the shaker of parmesan cheese and looks at him seriously. "And no. We're here because you couldn't wait three hours to meet me for coffee and you wanted to go out for dinner right away before I could even change out of this stupid pep squad uniform, which kind of makes my ass look fat. What's going on?"

"Your ass doesn't look fat," Duncan says automatically, shaking the parmesan cheese a little harder when none comes out the top. Must be clogged, he thought and gave up, setting it down between them on the table. "I just wanted to spend a little time with you, okay?"

She just raises an eyebrow at him, and since he knows that look and knows that she will eventually get the information out of him, he gives in. "I just had a weird feeling about today."

"You didn't eat the cafeteria's sloppy joes again, did you?"

He grins at her attempt to lighten his mood. "Logan dared me."

"I swear, you two are going to wind up bungee-jumping off the Golden Gate bridge," she pauses, looking thoughtful, and Duncan notices then that they're the only ones in hearing distance and wonders where all the little kids went. Then Lilly exclaims, "Ooh, hey! We should go bungee jumping!" and he cringes because he knows if she really wants to go bungee jumping, he's going to get roped into going with her.

Thankfully, he's saved from having to reply to that when her cell phone rings from its spot on the table beside his, and he notices the caller is their mother. "It's Mom."

She immediately responds, "That thing in third period was SO not my fault. You'll make her realize it's not my fault, right Duncan?"

"I don't even wanna know what that thing in third period was," he shakes his head as the phone rings again. "You better answer that."

She sighs and flips open the phone, saying brightly, "Lilly's sex chat, how do you like them hung?"

Duncan tries very hard not to encourage her by laughing as she grins cheerfully at him. He can hear their mother lecturing from across the table, so he holds his hand out and she passes him the phone. "Hi, Mom," he interrupts her spiel on proper phone etiquette. "We're in the middle of dinner, what's going on?"

He only half-listens to their mother complain about Lilly's behavior for a few minutes -- grinning at Lilly's mocking imitation of their mother across the table -- and the next thing he hears is, "...and they somehow got past the alarm system and into the house."

"Wait, what?" Duncan asks, holding up his hand to quiet Lilly, who pouts at him and folds her arms over her chest before flouncing off toward the maze of tunnels. "Someone did what?"

She repeats that someone broke into the house and vandalized things, and the police are there searching the house right now. And Duncan tells her, "We'll be home in a bit."

And when he hangs up, the lights in their area suddenly seem a lot dimmer and he can barely make out the outline of Lilly coming down the slide on one of the tunnels. "Well?" she asks him as she skips back over to him. "What happened?"

"Someone broke into the house," he tells her, and she looks at him quizically. "I guess they didn't steal anything, just broke a lot of stuff."

"If they find the remains of a glass statue shaped like a penis, I'm saying it was yours," Lilly informs him, then seems to realize that he was serious. "Why would someone go to all the trouble to get past the security system just to break things?"

"You got me," he shakes his head and tugs her closer to him, and she leans against the table in front of him. "Mom said the police are still there looking for clues. We should probably head home."

"Oh, oh my god!" Lilly suddenly exclaims, hitting him in the shoulder, and he looks up at her. "Maybe this was what your weird feeling was about! Maybe you had some kind of premonition that something bad was gonna happen. You knew that you couldn't let me go home!"

"I don't know about that," Duncan says, even though she's right and his weird feeling makes sense now. "Maybe it really was just the sloppy joes."

"Oh my god, what if I went home early and ran into him and he bludgeoned me to death with one of Mom's ugly shoes?"

Duncan shakes his head and pulls her down to him, and she crawls into his lap and lays her head on his shoulder. He wraps his arms around her and strokes her hair softly because the thought of what could have happened if she had gone home early makes something in the pit of his stomach tighten and coil, and he hugs her to him tighter to convince himself that she's okay.

"You've got an overactive imagination," he makes sure he sounds more certain of it than he feels so he's comforting her instead of worrying her. "We're both," he trails off as he notices that her hair seems wet all of the sudden. "...fine."

"Duncan?" her voice sounds weak and far away as she pulls back from him slightly, and there's suddenly blood trailing down the side of her face as she blinks wide, glassy eyes at him.

And then he wakes up in a cold sweat.

 

**02 // if you want me to, boy, i could lie to you**

Duncan doesn't remember giving the eulogy at Lilly's funeral. He's watched the news coverage tapes of himself giving a calm, composed speech about Lilly that she probably would've smacked him for -- _Oh please! 'Wonderful young woman?' Duncan, don't say what Mom wants to hear! Tell them what I was really like!_ \-- and it was almost like watching a newscaster on CNN talk about a dip in the stock market.

It didn't seem real.

The first thing that night that he does have a clear memory of is Logan's body against his as they both cried Lilly's name, and he still thinks she was there watching because it was suddenly like everything came back into focus when Logan's hands were on him, the same way his world came into focus whenever he was with Lilly.

Nothing was ever in focus anymore unless he was with Logan.

He thought Lilly would've approved.

~

Three months after Lilly's funeral, Celeste boxed up everything in her room and put it in storage somewhere. She refused to say where. Duncan didn't find out about it until he got home from school, and when he did, to say all hell broke loose was an understatement.

When his mother wouldn't relent about bringing Lilly's things home, he played his trump card and called his father home from work in the middle of the day. He'd never seen his father so completely furious as when he first saw Lilly's room, stripped bare and repainted a soft rose color she would have hated with new Victorian style furniture she would've carved obscene words into just to prove a point.

The furniture and paint stayed, anyway. It wasn't Lilly's room anymore.

He woke up that evening to find Lilly leafing through his schedule for the week, and she grinned that beautiful, open Lilly grin as she looked over at him. "Welcome to Camp Naughty-Bad-Fun! I'm Lilly, and I'll be your mistress this evening..."

"L-Lilly?" he sat up in bed and looked at her, afraid she'd fade away if he moved at all, but she flounced across the room and leapt onto the bed with an exaggerated twirl, landing at his feet and hitting his leg. He hesitated as he reached out to touch her, but she was solid and warm and REAL beneath his fingers. "They said you were dead."

"I am dead, silly," she laughed at him, her eyes sparkling. "But you won't let me go."

~

"Are you a ghost?" Duncan asked her the third day she appeared in his room while he was sleeping, and she studied him from her spot sprawled out across the foot of his bed with a Cosmo magazine. "Or are you real?"

"Reality's what you make of it," she idly flipped to the next page while she continued to look at him, and he was almost unnerved by the way she was observing him. "I'm real enough for you, aren't I?"

He persisted, "You're not a ghost?"

"I don't think so," she sighed and tossed the Cosmo aside in favor of crawling up the bed to him and curling up against him, and her hair smelled like her favorite mango scented shampoo as he breathed her in. "Do I feel like a ghost?" she asked quietly, her voice muffled against his neck as she let him hold her tightly. "Do I feel real?"

"You feel real," he told her, relishing having her in his arms, all warm and soft and alive and LILLY when everyone else believed she was gone forever. "I miss you, Lilly."

"You've got a whole new life thing going, and your special fun time with Logan, which by the way, is so completely hot I wish I'd known you two would go for that while I was still here," he could hear her smile in her tone as she traced small patterns on his chest. "You're doing fine without me."

"I'm not," he insisted, clutching her tighter to him in case she was thinking about leaving. "I need you!"

"Shh," she soothed him as she pulled back slightly and looked him in the eye. "You know I'll stick around as long as you need me."

~

He started going straight home after school and locking his bedroom door before the clock hit three in the afternoon, because Lilly would only come to him if he was alone. He heard his parents worrying about it as he left in the middle of breakfast because he couldn't stand the tension anymore.

As he walked in and dropped his backpack next to his door, Lilly slinked out of his walk-in closet where he'd snuck some of her clothes before their mother got rid of anything remotely Lilly in the house, picking at the light green sweater she was wearing with a dissatisfied look. "Couldn't you have saved my pink haltar top?" she complained as she examined herself in his mirror. "I may be dead, but that doesn't mean I have to be out of style."

"I would've saved everything if I could've."

She looked over at him with a soft smile that reminded him of late nights they snuck into the living room to watch movies at one in the morning when they were little and still had a strictly enforced bedtime. "I know."

They stood across the room from each other in silence for a few of the longest seconds he'd ever felt, and he knew then that something bad was going to happen the same way he knew when he got home that night and Lilly's car was in the driveway but he couldn't hear her music playing from outside the house like he usually could. "No..."

"I'm gonna have to leave soon," she told him quietly as she crossed the room and tugged him over to the bed to sit down. "But I promise you won't really even notice it."

"How could I not notice?" Duncan asked furiously. "You can't go, Lilly, you promised you'd stay as long as I needed you!"

"And you're not gonna need me," Lilly's eyes were wide, earnest, and he knew that she really wanted him to be okay with her going because she'd worry about him if he didn't somehow assure her things were going to be okay like he always did. "I know this doesn't make sense yet, but it will, I swear."

Knowing he was going to lose her all over again almost hurt worse than losing her the first time did, and he whispered, "I wanna go with you."

"No," Lilly shook her head emphatically and lifted her hands to cup his face and force him to look her in the eye. "No, you don't, Duncan. You promise me you won't even try."

He mirrored her gesture and pushed her hair away from her face, brushing his thumbs over her cheekbones and she felt so god damn real he didn't want to believe that she wasn't. "Will you come back?"

"Yeah," she leaned forward and her lips barely brushed against his as she whispered softly, and he heard his mother knocking at the door asking to come in and speak with him about something important. "I'll be back when you can see me again."

He regretted not doing something more than holding her and touching her face until his fourth day on the pills. Then he stopped feeling enough to feel regret.

 

**03 // you're your favorite stranger**

Duncan and Logan lie to each other almost as much as they lie to themselves.

They pretend not to see things that are all too obvious, because acknowledging those things would make them more real. Duncan pretends that Logan's father doesn't beat him whenever Logan does something to piss him off enough, and Logan pretends that Duncan isn't a zombie on meds that barely resembles the Duncan he became friends with in the first place.

Duncan likes to think it's easier that way.

But deep down, he knows it isn't.

~

Duncan has not been himself since Lilly was gone.

He's not quite sure who he's been, but he's sure he doesn't like the guy much, and he kind of thinks Lilly wouldn't like him much either in the fleeting second he can think about her before the drugs take his mind to more safe thoughts. And he can only think clearly without the drugs interfering with Logan's hand or Logan's mouth wrapped around him, and before he realizes he was wondering aloud, he asks, "Do you still miss her?"

Which is wrong, because they never, never talk about Lilly together, but especially not during this. The only mention of her during this is how they both still say her name at the end.

Logan freezes, looking up at him with shock, but admits, "Yeah." He's quiet for a moment before he asks, "Do you?"

"Yeah."

Silence, awkward and uncomfortable as right after their first time together, stretches between them and they wordlessy agree that the mood has definitely passed as Logan flops next to him on the bed. "I used to see her," Duncan confides, because Logan is the one person in the world who could possibly understand what he means with this. "Before..." he doesn't say 'the drugs' because the drugs are one of the things they pretend don't exist. "I used to see her."

Logan doesn't look at him, looks straight up at the ceiling instead. "Right after she..." he trails off, and Duncan knows the word 'died' sticks in Logan's throat the same way it does in his when referring to Lilly. "Right after, I used to think I saw her everywhere."

Duncan lets it go at that, and thinks maybe it's time to stop the pretending for a little while. "What do you think of the pills?"

Logan's gaze snaps to meet his, surprised, and he answers very carefully, "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean," Duncan tells him. "I wanna know what you think."

And when Logan finally tells him, -- and he knew all along what Logan really thought -- he decides he's going to go off the drugs. And he's determined not to let nightmares of Lilly covered in blood throw him off course this time.

Logan promises to help him through it.

~

Duncan hasn't been able to remember much about the night of Lilly's... leaving. Not since he went on the pills. But fuck if he doesn't remember in minute, excruciating detail the sight of her laying on the pool deck.

He remembers the blood, god, there was so much blood, and he remembers rushing to her and falling to his knees, begging her to wake up, and _jesusgodfucknonoNO_ when she wouldn't.

Until he started going off the drugs, that was the last thing he remembered until the night of Lilly's funeral. Now bits and pieces are starting to come back to him, and he thinks Veronica was there; he thinks he remembers her looking up at him, looking scared and anxious and he thinks he wanted to comfort her but couldn't -- shouldn't -- and she was asking him what was wrong over and over until she finally asked THE question.

"Where's Lilly?"

He thinks he told her Lilly was gone, but he can't remember for sure.

~

The third day off the pills is the worst by far.

He has nightmares of getting home in time to watch Lilly scream over and over as Abel Koontz bashes her head in, but he's moving through molasses and can't get to her until it's already too late and she's looking up at him with wide, lifeless eyes.

He has nightmares of Lilly, bleeding and dead and decaying, rising from her coffin to blame him for her death, and the way she says his name makes him want to scream but his vocal cords won't work. And just as she reaches one bony hand toward him, he wakes up in a cold sweat, sick to his stomach and wondering why the hell he let Logan convince him that the pills were a bad idea.

Logan stays up with him the fourth night, distracting him with Rockstars and GTA on the Playstation 2 until six in the morning, and by the time they fall into Logan's bed, the sky is lightening through the windows.

Duncan's so tired he sleeps without dreaming.

~

The seventh day, he hears Kimmy announce to the entire school that he's still hung up on Veronica. Combined with the rather interesting email he'd gotten from "Veronica" the day before, he decides that this would've been a great day to still be on the drugs just so he could give a shit about whether or not his ex-girlfriend still cared about him.

It hurts how much he does still care.

Logan is not pleased that the longer Duncan's off the drugs, the more he likes to talk about what might have been with Veronica. _She's not the same Veronica, Dude_, he'd say every time the subject of Veronica came up. _She's not ours anymore._

Neither of them ever comment on the fact he always says 'ours' like Veronica was as much his as Lilly was Duncan's, and Duncan still hasn't asked what made them turn on each other while he was in a dazed stupor of grief.

He's not sure he really wants to know.

So when Veronica stops him in the parking lot and anxiously tries to convince him that she didn't have V.D. -- which she had to know he'd never believe in the first place -- he doesn't want them to walk away on an awkward pause again, so he jokes with her.

Seeing Veronica smile at him like that again gets him through the seventh night.

 

**04 // do something safe for the picture frame**

It happens his thirteenth day off the pills.

He's home late because, like every night since the fourth night, he was at Logan's. Sometimes he thinks Logan is the only thing keeping him sane and strong enough to deal with life whether he's on the pills or not. Then he walks into his room and throws his keys on the dresser, and that achingly familiar, sweet voice tells him, "I come all this way to see you and you can't even get home at a reasonable hour?"

First he freezes, and sadly enough, he wonders if this is another nightmare and when he turns around, she'll be bleeding and blaming him again. He turns around so slowly it seems like it took at least an hour, and when he finally gathers the balls to look up at her, she's standing there looking safe and whole and completely amused with him. "Lilly?"

"Yeah, what, you forgot about me already?" she asks with a soft little grin as she moves toward him, and something in the back of his mind rings with deja vu, but he lets it go without trying to figure it out because she's real and she's really here again and she's coming toward him. "I told you I'd be back when you could see me again. Didn't expect it to take this long, though--"

And he cuts her off by wrapping his arms around her and crushing her to him, and she's solid and real and Lilly in his arms as he lifts her up and buries his face in her neck. "Shh, Duncan," she comforts him, and her fingernails softly running through his hair reminds him of the night she confronted him about blowing off Veronica; once he'd explained to her, she'd comforted him then, too. "Everything's good now. I'm not going anywhere tonight."

He hates the way 'tonight' sounds like a qualifier that means she won't be back tomorrow, and he thinks maybe if he never lets go of her, she won't be able to leave again. He whispers against her neck, "I miss you so much."

"Well, who wouldn't? I'm totally awesome!" she laughs lightly and her arms are around his neck until she draws away from just enough that he can look into her eyes, and god it was so good to be looking into her eyes and seeing them focusing back on him instead of being lifeless and glazed over. "I missed you too."

Somewhere between his hand on her thigh and her nails scoring his back, there's a thought about this being wrong and immoral and other words that mean bad, but then things go too far for Duncan to be able to think much of anything aside from _Oh God_ and _Jesus Christ_ and _Lilly_.

And he hopes she's risen again, too.

~

She whispers to him as he runs his fingers through her hair, traces lines up and down her skin just to be touching her and knowing that she's real. She weaves stories about how things are all going to work out and he won't always hurt when he thinks about her. She promises that everything will get better soon enough and that no matter what happens, he has to make sure he doesn't take any pills their mother puts out for him.

He swears he'll do anything she says, even though he knows it won't make her stay.

"Veronica's figuring everything out," she tells him softly, and the intrusion of Veronica's name here seems wrong somehow. Lilly had always encouraged him with Veronica, but Veronica never knew anything about the other side of his relationship with Lilly. "She's going to need your help, but she won't want it right away. Just be there to talk to her, okay? Show her that you're there if she needs you."

He promises he will, even though he knows it'll be hard.

~

He wakes up alone.

The pain squeezes his heart tight until he can't breathe because he hadn't had the chance to say goodbye to her again, hadn't had the chance to say all the things he'd been thinking about saying since the first time she left.

And losing her again was worse than losing her the first time.

He wants to go find his mother and ask her for another pill to numb the pain, anything to take away the ache of Lilly being gone again, but he promised her he wouldn't and he can't break that promise, not this soon. Instead, he calls Logan and begs him to come over, and something in his voice must have given him away because Logan is assuring him he'll be right there.

By the time Logan climbs into bed next to him, Duncan is numb again, too numb to cry over losing Lilly, but not nearly numb enough to stop feeling. "Christ, I miss her," he tells Logan. "I miss her so damn much."

Logan closes his eyes and settles in next to him, shaking his head. "Who doesn't?"

"She was here."

Logan lifts an eyebrow, but to his credit, manages to not make the smartass comment that Duncan _knows_ goes through his head. Instead, he says gently, "You were dreaming, man."

"She was real," Duncan insists, even though he knows that it sounds as crazy as he feels at the moment. "She was here."

"Duncan..."

"After she... I used to see her, Logan," he confesses, and he wants Logan to believe him because he's the only one who Duncan thinks could possibly understand what it was like to keep losing her every time she left. "She'd come visit me when nobody was around and she'd tell me it was because I couldn't let her go. Then she left when I went on the drugs, and I convinced myself that it wasn't real, but it was."

Logan just stares at him for a moment. "And now that you aren't taking the drugs, you see her again?"

"Not until tonight," Duncan answers. "Tonight was the first time she came back."

"You don't normally sleep naked, Duncan," Logan says, his voice suddenly completely devoid of any emotion, and he's not looking at the ceiling anymore. "What'd you do with her?"

Even though Logan doesn't believe him about Lilly actually being there, he's asking what Duncan knows has been on his mind since that first night when they both said her name. Duncan meets his gaze head-on. "You already know."

"When I was with her," Logan starts, swallowing hard. "Did you two ever..."

"No."

"Never?"

"No, Logan," he says honestly. "We wouldn't have done that to you."

Logan stares at him a minute longer, and finally nods. "There was something there, though, before she died. How far did you go?"

"Far enough," Duncan tells him, and he's not evading the question so much as answering safely, because he can't really seperate anymore what they'd really done from what he'd dreamed of doing after she died. "Tonight was the first time I stopped caring about whether or not it was wrong."

"You realize you sound fucking crazy, don't you?" Logan shakes his head and sighs. "Jesus, Duncan, you're telling me that your sister, my _girlfriend_, who's been dead for a year came to visit you tonight so you could fuck her. Do you realize how insane that is?"

"Yeah," Duncan looks up at the ceiling and tries to lighten the mood a little. "The question is, which do you like better? Dazed and confused Duncan or fucking crazy Duncan?"

"God help me, but fucking crazy Duncan."

"Good," Duncan offers him a small smile even though he knows that Logan doesn't believe that Lilly was actually there yet. "Because I promised her I wouldn't go back on the drugs."

~

One thing Duncan has learned about Logan over the past year is that he hogs the covers. Completely. Duncan can't remember the last time he woke up sharing a bed with Logan and still had any of the comforter or sheet covering him.

He doesn't bother opening his eyes as he reaches to his left and blindly grabs for the blanket, hitting Logan's chest and stomach a few times before managing to find the sheet, and as he yanks it hard toward himself, he hears, "Now THIS is a sight a girl could get used to!"

His eyes fly open, his gaze landing on Lilly's grinning face as she leans over the foot of the bed and traces her fingers around Logan's ankle. Almost afraid that he's dreaming, he whispers, "You're back."

"Well, duh," Lilly rolls her eyes at him. "I said I wasn't going anywhere."

"You said 'tonight'," Duncan sits up, watching her carefully. "I thought..."

"I know," Lilly moves around the bed and kisses him softly before sitting down on the bed in front of him, absently tracing her fingers up and down Logan's sleeping form. "But really, how could I resist the chance to come back and play with you both? It's BORING up there. I deserve a little fun!"

As if to prove her point, she presses a finger to his lips before he can speak. "So did he believe you when you told him about me?"

"Not really. He believes that I believe it, but he thinks I'm fucking crazy."

"Then this'll be a lot more fun," she looks at Logan mischievously before giving Duncan a wide grin. She kisses him again, the softest whisper of her lips against his before she leans down, her hair falling across his skin like a curtain hiding her face as she kissed Logan, too. Pulling back and leaning into Duncan's arms, she sing-songs quietly, "Lo-gan."

Logan grumbles something about it being fucking Saturday, so let him fucking sleep.

Lilly laughs.

Logan slowly opens his eyes, looking for all the world like he'd just been hit by a two-by-four while hungover.

Duncan just grins. "Told ya' she was real, Dude."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing with the timeline of when Duncan started taking the anti-depressants a bit. While I was writing this, I was trying to keep it open enough that it could go either way: Lilly really was able to visit Duncan after her death as long as he believed she was there, or it's all a figment of Duncan's imagination that he thinks is real (in which case, he was probably on something stronger than anti-depressants because of a more serious mental-health problem following Lilly's death).


End file.
